Prepar3d

[Kelvinr]

Hi All,

I've been doing research on this and read hundreds of posts about the new product called Prepar3d or as we all know ESP or (FSX's twin brother :-P). So, you will probably be asking the question, where is this topic going to go? Well what I want to do is actually try and convince people to start seriously looking into this product (it is possible as it has the developers subscription package for about $20NZD per month). Due to scouring hundreds of threads at Prepar3d website forum and other sites I have been convinced that there is a future with this product (actually JNicol said this himself). Now I was a little mad but that's me and I do have my moments of insanity so one of these moments lead me to purchase the retail version of the product (don't ask me what the cost was, even worse when you pull out the currency converter). What I want to do over time is actually use this for my own real world flight training so there is a real reason I got this product other than just flight simming. This now enables me to use it "not for entertainment use". Don't get me wrong if you are a hardcore enthusiast using it as a training aid to hone in on your flying skills then you are eligible to use it. There is a misconception out there that says only commercial organisations may use the software but that's not correct, it's just not for entertainment use as per terms of the license agreement, if you're using it as a hardcore simmer then that's fine. Anyway, i have found some exerts from John Nicol that can summarize the movement forward with Prepar3d and hope that it brings a little tingle in your belly about where this product is going. See below:

Taken from Mycockpit.org. For the full dialogue go to the following link, trust me it's something you would want to sit down with a coffee or tea and read but for now check out my posts below as it has some key pieces of information about the product.
http://www.mycockpit.org/forums/showthread...Martin-Prepar3d

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"I thought I should pipe up here as I am the guy responsible for Prepar3D commercialization. I have been a member of this site for years under another user name and I guess I wanted to keep that one under wraps... I have built sims at home for a few years (helicopter, desktop Cessna and a truck sim for my son), built them for a living (Bell 412, A320, tank sims etc), have a copy of Mike's sim instrument book and so on. Am I passionate about home cockpit building.....? yep.

We are going to be announcing the price point for the client and the Developer Network within the next two weeks and I wish I could be more specific on that. The surprise will undoubtedly come for developers participating in the development program.

I can tell you that I think it was the first day I joined the project, I said that the number 1, 2 and 3 items that will need to be addressed will be performance. (Actually I probably said that during my job interview as well!) We have been working on the core engine and we are looking at updating it from DirectX9 and getting cycles onto the GPU at some stage. It is a hard road, so I wouldn't count on major performance increases just yet, but there will be tweaks. A million lines of code is not something that we can get through easily! The development team are world-class though, they are working on it and we have an exciting roadmap for the product!! Yes, we also have a couple of guys from the old ACES Studio as well and I will leave it to them to introduce themselves through the website blogs when they come up for air.

Some of the new features include sensors, multi-user enhancements (i.e. more than two users sharing a cockpit), brand new user interface, upgrade to Visual Studio 10, OpenGL to DirectX support and others that I am hoping to share in the next week. (*hint* anyone like submarines?) I also asked Pete Dowson if he would support Prepar3D with FSUIPC and he has integrated this support in the very latest version (which will also be available as a download on the Prepar3D website as well).

All in all as long as you are not using Prepar3D for entertainment purposes, cockpit builders should be happy. At least you know that there is a MyCockpit mole on the inside....

I would encourage interested people to get onto the site and tell us what they want and if there are any annoying things that would make life easier that we could fix or put into a future build. We really intend opening up the doors and getting the community involved with us to make it even better. It is our intent to make regular updates and patches (er...feature enhancements) to the product and not do a release every 3 or so years, so there will be more opportunity to get features in and updates out.

Regards,
John

Note that the views and opinions expressed in this post are my own and do not necessarily represent the views and opinions of Lockheed Martin."
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John goes on to note:

"Well, I also hope that we can attract the development community to the platform that have had previous experience with FS9 and FSX. There will be lots of opportunity to reach our target commercial market with the add-ons and utilities that make the base platform the powerful engine it is. There are lots of examples that I am seeing now, including the use of payware aircraft and scenery add-ons by commercial users that want to enhance the experience. I definitely believe that there are opportunities for people to contribute and be part of this at many different levels.

I hope, for example that we can start a Search and Rescue group and get the community to contribute payware/freeware aircraft, missions, challenges, flight plans and so on. An Emergency Preparedness and Response group, a Humanitarian Assistance group, the list goes on. There are flight schools and colleges that want Prepar3D, so I see lots of opportunity for enhanced payware aircraft with realistic start-up and shut down procedures, local scenery add-ons for those guys and again tutorials, missions, tools etc. Lots of opportunity I think for hardware providers as well as we move the goal post from entertainment into commercial areas that may be interesting for folks. People in this forum have great ideas and talents putting hardware and software together so I have no doubt that there will be some great ideas coming up!

Just some random thoughts."
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moreover:
(with regard to load balancing the simulator)
"...The new ATI Eyefinity cards can have up to six monitors out. There was a limitation with ESP that had a maximum of 4 monitors out before it would crash. This has been fixed in P3D, so that using something like an Eyefinity, you can have 5 or 6 monitors/projectors out. We have also put in a new feature to address performance issues where you can run the main simulator PC with only an instrument panel and no out-the-window visuals.

Simulation systems such as Project Magenta in a typical client/server configuration will allow instrument panels to be run on separate machines with a copy of FSX being used for each out-the-window view. For typical development environments I can see that two copies of the software will be sufficient for most applications, however I acknowledge there will be some commercial applications that will require additional copies for development. I would see that these more complex environments may have more than one developer working on them?

Saying that, I will look at this for sure and look at pricing of additional development copies over and above the two. Remember that we are talking about $10 per month for the first two to allow smarter people than me to develop apps for P3D.

When I built my A320 sim I had a single channel with multiple projectors out on the single video card, so only needed one copy of FSX and had other software for the instruments. My Bell 412 was the same. If I was going to upgrade the basic systems, then of course I would look at a PC per channel for greater performance.

Perhaps people reading this could give me an idea of their typical configurations for multiple copies. That would certainly help me to ensure that the developer community is going to be served.

John"
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It just goes on and on. The best thing about this solution is actually the team behind it as they are so open about the development process it's just crazy. This means the community can get invloved and responded to. Anyway, i'll leave it to yourselves to run through the full dialogue at the forum to get a real feel of where this product is going. Good by FSX (for me anyway).

Cheers,

Kelvin

[Nzeddy]

Prepar3D - The future of flight simulation. (IMHO)

http://www.prepar3d.com/experience/images/

[Adamski]

Kelvin - thanks for putting all that together and pasting it here. I may need a bit of time to go through it all, but I've looked at screenshots of Prepar3D in the past and been seriously impressed!

It'll be interesting to see if 1,000's of entertainment/simmers jumping onto the Prepar3D bandwagon after the "Flight" debacle will affect their business model and [therefore] pricing.

[deeknow]

Hey Kelvin, thanks for sharing mate, certainly gonna be interesting to follow developments over time.
Not sure we'd need a dedicated forum here at nzff.org though, dont really see the point in duplicating all the discussions that are already going on in other forums with much wider audiences???

QUOTE (Nzeddy @ Jan 11 2012,6:03 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Prepar3D - The future of flight simulation. (IMHO)

Heh, you would say that Eddy, coz that's what your boss says too right?

[AndrewJamez]

Anyone seen there posts about prepar2.0 They claim updated code for full GPU support and DX10 support as well as a host of other enhacements. If 2.0 turns out what they say it will be then simmers wont be able to hold off for ever. The temptaion will be to great.

[markll]

QUOTE (AndrewJamez @ Jan 11 2012,10:37 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Anyone seen there posts about prepar2.0 They claim updated code for full GPU support and DX10 support as well as a host of other enhacements. If 2.0 turns out what they say it will be then simmers wont be able to hold off for ever. The temptaion will be to great.

Seriously guys, some perspective here...we're NOT talking about a piece of software you buy for $90 from dick smith anymore with this thing. Whilst it's based upon FSX and the temptation is to treat it like it's the rebirth of FS 11 as a result, it's NOT. The target market is NOT people who like to fly at home on their desktop PC. Read those comments again. They're aiming at a commercial market, not a consumer one. LM obviously saw ESP (now Prepar3d) as the vehicle to hitting the small-to-mid size aviation "businesses" - so, not the big boys, like large airlines, or manufacturers or anything like that, but more the flight schools, and so on. A fairly large, untapped market that might benefit from a cheap (from a commercial sim point of view) and approachable, yet powerful, sim tool.

I honestly don't think we should be getting too excited about this and assuming it's going to be the next FSX, because I dont think it will be.

[toprob]

QUOTE (markll @ Jan 12 2012,9:34 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

Seriously guys, some perspective here...we're NOT talking about a piece of software you buy for $90 from dick smith anymore with this thing.

This is actually one of the reasons why people are considering a shift to Prepar3D -- since there isn't a huge choice of quality simulators available in the 'games' category. LM do seem to be exploring this, with the mention of a new price structure, but there are plenty of simmers who would be happy to pay a premium for a sim in continuous development. I think there are a lot of issues for LM to sort out, but the fact that they are willing to look at the issues makes them one of the good guys. The fact that they are actively working on improving Prepar3D is a huge plus.

I'd rather not see a new sub-forum -- the original forum structure was divided into different aspects of simming, rather than different simulators, the' FSX' forum broke this design a bit. After all, we don't have a FS2004 or FS2002 sub-forum. The FSX forum does makes things a bit confused -- if you post about technical issues with FS2004, it is obvious that you'd post in the Technical Issues sub-forum, aircraft discussions go in the Aircraft sub-forum, scenery has it's own forum, so what goes in FSX?

It would be interesting to get an idea of the interest in Prepar3D, so I might post a poll.

[Adamski]

QUOTE (toprob @ Jan 12 2012,10:00 AM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

It would be interesting to get an idea of the interest in Prepar3D, so I might post a poll.

I'd like to see that

I think we also need to be brutally honest about our "addiction" ... and add up what we've spent on FS9/FSX to get them "up to scratch" ... probably way more than what they're likely to charge for P3D. I have a spreadsheet with all my payware information in it (handy for re-installation). The one one thing I refused to do was add a *price* column (and therefore total)

[Kelvinr]

I respect all the comments about Prepar3d. This product has the potential to meet the needs of all of us that use FSX which was unable to provide an adequate performance without tweaking. This is Commercial simulation software but licensed that way not to prevent current sim community from using the product. I have been using/testing this product and I am happy with what I see and the fact dx11 will be built on this platform (imagine the performance increase) and performance tweaks along the way rather than 3 yearly builds then this is the product for me. Anyway, I am happy to be as helpful as I can to provide you with honest and real information about this product so you can make your mind up if you want to go this way. I mean if you have questions ask and I will help where I can.

Cheers

[markll]

QUOTE (Kelvinr @ Jan 12 2012,1:43 PM) <{POST_SNAPBACK}>

...

this is the product for me.

A mate and I have long harboured a secret ambition to set up something in a commercial sense based around FlightSim too, and given the way things appear to be going, Prepar3d could well be the platform for that too... the point I was trying to make earlier is simply that its not aimed at "home" users - it never would be at $500 US per end user license.

And I know that they've said that a monthly fee of $20 is enough to get a couple of dev. copies but lets be honest here, MOST people would never be actually developing with it, so they'd be in breach of the license conditions surely?

[SgtPepper]

Far east! At $500.00 US I definatly won't be going down that track.

[Bazza]

Me neither, not even with a pensioner discount.......